


Beef Pancakes

by BP16



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gangsters, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-25 01:00:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9795302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BP16/pseuds/BP16
Summary: New York City is home to near hundreds of gangs, some only a few men strong, some household names across the world. But few have ever been as successful as the infamous Avengers.





	1. Chapter 1

### Warm up

  
“He’s right there, Clint. It's 3am. Just take the shot.”  
  
They’d been crouched in the rain for the better part of 15 minutes and if Sam’s constant whining was any indication of his enthusiasm to remain, it was 15 minutes too long. From what he could see, his companion had a clear obvious shot. He'd had a clear obvious shot for near the whole time they'd been here.  
  
"Sure, let me pull the trigger while he's addressing his little crew, that definitely won't get us mobbed by 7 mercenaries at once. Gotta wait til he's alone."  
  
The pair had been sent to take out the "Gamesmaster", some rich tycoon who'd apparently gotten bored and decided to use his wealth to play a game with the citizens of New York. He'd cast an open call to a bunch of mercs saying he'd reward any kill so long as he could see it through a camera the mercs had to carry. To make things more interesting, he'd randomly select a citizen from his list and make the reward ridiculously high for anyone that got there first. He'd promised a grand reward for the player with the most kills by the time he got bored again. Unfortunately for both himself and the mercs, the Gamesmaster simply wouldn't last that long.  
  
"Alright, they're starting to leave. Shouldn't have to be here much longer." Clint tightened his grip on his rifle. "Why does Tony even want this guy?"   
  
"We don't ask, we shoot."  
  
" _I shoot_. You sit next to me and moan while I work. Speaking of which..." On cue, the rifle jerked slightly backwards. Sam looked through his binoculars to see the window of the target riddled with cracks. "Time to go, Sam."   
  
"Finally."   
  
The pair made their way down the stairs and away from the top level of the multistory car park opposite the Gamesmasters apartment, casually talking about their plans to celebrate a job well done before coming to a completely silent stop as they reached the door for the bottom floor. Just as they were opening said door, four cars pulled into the car park, all driven by men in identical bandanas. When the cars stopped, even more people wearing the same bandanas poured out, until at least 30 of them littered the area.   
  
"Fiddlesticks."  
  
"Sam, listen, I know this is a tense situation but could we watch the fucking language?" Clint tapped his earpiece and immediately heard the voice of their 'fearless leader'.  
  
"Okay, I may have made a _slight_ mistake."  
  
"Tony, a slight mistake is telling us that there's 5 guys when there's 6. A slight mistake is not making my vantage point the middle of a gang hideout." Clint flipped off the nearest security camera, knowing that Tony was watching through it. "What happened to ' _an easy job_ '?"  
  
"Do you want easy or fun? The Hulks waiting outside. I can shut down the lights to the building for a couple seconds. What's your chances of making it out in the dark?"  
  
"If we can't, you'll be down two dogs when the lights turn on."  
  
Sam unholstered his pistol and sighed. "Optimistic as always, Clint. We're ready when you are, boss."  
  
"Beep beep boop beep aaand now." The security camera bowed it's head and seconds later, the building plunged into darkness. Sam kicked open the door and the pair dashed towards the general area of the exit. Through the darkness, shouts of the gang echoed in confusion and confusion quickly became alarm after Clint ran directly into someone. Thankfully the gang member simply thought it was a friend.  
  
"Careful, man. Why d'you think the lights are out?"  
  
Clint said "Power outage." before swinging in the man's direction, hoping he'd hit more than darkness. Through sheer luck, the punch connected with the man's jaw and Clint continued running, Within seconds, he found the door, pushing it open allowing him and Sam to run out before the lights came back on. A green van pulled up in front of them and the side door slid open. The gang had clearly noticed their unconscious comrade and began to search for the culprit but Sam and Clint were already safely in an inconspicuous van, driving down the street as if nothing had happened. The pair sat in silence for a minute or two before the window connecting the back of the van to the drivers seat slid down.  
  
"I suppose Tony made a 'slight mistake' again?"  
  
"Nothing we couldn't handle." Sam smirked as Clint placed his rifle onto the rack of weaponry inside Bruce's pride and joy "The Hulk", a van he'd bought off a window cleaner and turned into a mechanical monster of a getaway car. "When's the last time we had a job that didn't have one of his 'slight mistakes'?"  
  
"Did you succ-" Bruce was almost immediately interrupted by sirens as a group of police vehicles sped past. This seemed to answer whatever questions he had planned. "Good job. The boss wanted you back home."  
  
"The man can't let us rest, can he?"  
  
The van eventually arrived at the base of Stark tower, pulling into the garage after being waved through the security checkpoint. The freight elevator designed into the building had the original purpose of bringing tony's cars to their own private floor for him to admire extended directly into Bruce's personal workshop.  
  
"In the party deck, I'll be up later." Bruce waved them off and turned his attention to the Hulk.  
  
Sam tried to stay quiet as they made their way to the area that Tony liked to call "the party deck." A job during the night was hardly a strange thing for the Avengers but most of them tried to be respectful around the living area at night. Clint was an exception to this unspoken rule. Being told off for his noise by both Jarvis as he passed and a furious scream from Bucky and Steve's room didn't seem to hamper his volume at all. The pair eventually pushed through the door into the party deck to find Tony fully suited pouring himself a glass of scotch.  
  
"Well, Gentlemen? How was your warm up?"


	2. Shooting Tires

"Only you would call executing a millionaire a warm-up, Stark."

"I'm sorry, would you prefer some warm-up jumping jacks? Maybe a jog?"

Sam and Clint made their way to Tony's table for the briefing, Clint grabbing one of Tony's bottles of scotch on the way there.

"A please would be nice, Barton."

"Giving me a vantage point that isn't a gang hideout would be nice too. Life is tragic for us all." Clint smirked and popped off the bottle lid. "So what's the big job that leaves the Gamesmaster a warm-up?"

"I want you to shoot some tires." 

The brief stunned silence of the room lasted a matter of seconds before being broken by Sam's chuckling and Clint exploding into laughter.

"Tony, a millionaire hit doesn't exactly seem like something to loosen us up before some tires."

"Well, Sam, your job is a little easier than that."

"Easier than tire target practice?" Clint still had the constant smirk he had since he walked into the room, spiking every time he made some kind of quip. Therefore, every other sentence he said. 

"Much easier. All he has to do is distract 20 armed men." 

Just as Tony returned Clint's smirk, Sam's smile dropped. "You have the world's worse sense of perspective." 

"Just hurry up and brief us, Tony. If Sam's going to get shot, I'd prefer we get it over with so I can get to bed."

"Barton, you're-"

"Hilarious. You're about to say hilarious."

"-a dick."

"What happened to fiddlesticks?"

"Sorry to interrupt your pissing contest but we have a job to do." Tony took a folded map out of his suit pocket and tossed it over the table to Clint. "The warehouse I circled. Base of some puppet gang. Normally I wouldn't bother even looking at them but we need to send out a little message. They've been saying some less than savoury things about us and we can't have anyone on the street talking about the Avengers like that. If one gang gets cocky enough to do it, eventually they'll all start pipe up. Natasha's been keeping an eye on them and they're meeting with another gang tonight. Restaurant, up the road from their base. I want the warehouse to burn and I want the visitor gang to see it happen. Sam, take Thor and the other dogs and march straight through the front door. Keep their attention while Natasha lines the place to blow. Barton, I want you across the street. Other gang drive straight past the warehouse. You shoot out their tires. They're driving passed, skid to a stop and they see their hosts running in fear."

"This is the most unnecessarily convoluted plan I've ever seen. Put me across the street, I shoot their leader, we're done."

"Where's your showmanship, Barton? The warehouse is valuable to them, a million little gangs have been pining after it for a while and I want to flex our big Avenging muscles and show that we're not just silent killers that snipe people through windows. I want all of them to see it destroyed. Remind them who they should be scared of. Dismissed."

Clint and Sam left Tony to his scotch and convoluted planning and went to the living quarters to collect their team mates. 

"Wakey wakey, lovebirds!" Clint slammed his fist against Bucky and Steve's door. The pair and Sam had quickly become known as Stark's dogs after joining the Avengers, the three of them always on the ground doing the dirty work.

The door opened to show Bucky standing behind it, half-dressed and holding a pillow. "It is 4 in the morning. If this isn't gang business, Clint, I'll throw you off the tower, see if the 'hawk' can fly."

"Cheery, Barnes. It's business. Get the Captain dressed and meet us in the garage."

Bucky shut the door and groaned before tossing the pillow onto Steve, lying on the bed.

"Morning time, Rogers."

Clint made his way down the elevator to the garage. Thor, Sam and Natasha had already gathered next to the Hulk. Thor was the only Avenger that Clint knew next to nothing about. He knew nothing about how he became an Avenger either. Banner worked for Stark when Tony brought him in, Bucky and Steve came in together after running against the Avengers as hired muscle, Nat came when Clint was hired, the Captain reached out to Sam after he was discharged from the army but Thor? Thor was just a huge Scandinavian that was just...in the gang one day. Clint just woke one morning to find a Fabio impersonator on the party deck talking to Nat about his shotgun "Mjolnir" like it was his son. Clint thought it best not to question it. Eventually, the other dogs arrived and Clint passed Bruce the map.

"Second run in one night, Banner?"

"Just doing my job."

The van pulled out of Stark tower's garage and headed toward the warehouse. Sirens still flashed in the distance trying to deal with the murder of a millionaire less than a few hours before. It only took a quarter of an hour to reach the warehouse. Too close to home to let slander about the Avengers pass unpunished. 

"I'll be up the street, just call me when you've dealt with our friends."

"Shouldn't take long, doctor." Steve had sat shotgun for the ride, as he tended to. With an alias like "the Captain", it was hard for anyone not to view him as the one in charge. As the van drove away, the group spotted two guards at the front door. Most would think of two armed men as a hindrance to a plan. Thor, on the other hand, laughed.

"Allow me, friends."

The 3 dogs waited at the other side of the road while Clint set up in the opposite building and Natasha simply disappeared. Thor approached the door with his shotgun strapped across his back and was immediately spotted by the guards.

"Move along." Both guards raised their weapons.

"No need for the guns, brothers. Your leader asked to see me. An envoy."

The guards looked sceptical but the idea of someone approaching a pair of armed men with the intention of passing them to be greeted with more armed men, all the while with a grin on his face kerbed their suspicion.

"Drop your weapon and we'll escort you in. Your hand goes nowhere near the trigger."

"Of course." Thor reached back and grabbed his shotgun by the barrel. "No trigger here." 

With that remark, Thor swung the gun like a bat and brought the stock crashing against both men's jaws. As they crumpled to the floor, he laughed and turned to his companions with his arms spread in victory. The rest joined him, firearms on hand standing before the door and, to bring as much attention to themselves as possibly, Steve kicked open the door. The four were instantly met with three guns pointed at them each. 

"Hello!" Despite the threat of being shot, Thor maintained his smile. 

One of the gun men shouted to the group. Despite the 3 to 1 advantage, they still appeared terrified. "Why are you here?"

"Who's in charge?" Steve ignored the man's question. His only task was to keep their attention until Natasha was ready.

The group shifted uneasily. "He's at a meeting."

"Your guards were weak." Thor grinned. "They crumpled like tissue paper."

The rest of the men in the warehouse gathered with the crowd, now making the crowd outnumber the Avengers 5 to 1. If they hadn't already been uneasy, being told that their guards "crumpled" wouldn't have helped.

"You know who we are?" Steve held eye contact with the man who was talking to them.

"Stark's dogs." The group became more restless by the second. "B-but why are you here?"

Steve caught a black figure up on the warehouse catwalk leave through a window which was quickly followed by Natasha's voice in his earpiece telling him that it was time to go.

"Not your concern." Steve backed up toward the door, with the rest of the Avengers following suit. The group made no attempt to stop them. They didn't want the four bruisers of the most powerful gang hanging inside their base for any longer than completely necessary. As the Avengers left the building, a car appeared down the road. Before it could pass the warehouse, both front wheels collapsed and the car skidded to a halt. Almost in tandem, the warehouse burst into flames. From the car's sight, the message was impossible to miss. A gang that had foul-mouthed the Avengers had burst into flames with 4 of said Avengers standing in front of it, staring directly towards the men inside the car. The Hulk pulled up on the other side of the road and the Avengers climbed in.

"Well, do you think the 'little message' was sent?" Bruce drove the Hulk away from the scene at a leisurely pace.

"The visiting gang saw us there as their friends burned. They got what we were saying." Bucky cracked a smile.

"Does anyone know how hard it is to hit the tires of a moving car? It's hard."

"Seems like a walk in the park compared to setting up explosive with less sound than a pin drop, Barton." 

"Romanoff, Barton, play nice." The Captain called back from the front seat. "At least now we can go home and rest."

"Unless this was another one of Stark's warm-ups."

The sun had began to rise. However, after a long night of killing millionaires and burning down warehouses, Clint was prepared to sleep right through til the next night mission.

Unless Stark had another mission before then.


	3. Spudz Mackenzie

"Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, children of all ages, Mr Barton is defying all we thought possible and is hungover again, in a record time of only 12 hours after a mission!"  
  
"No, no, no, don't try that shtick with me, Barnes, I'm the fucking jester here, go back to the angsty racoon we found you as."  
  
Clint sat, or rather slumped, at the main table in the party deck, face down in what appeared to be a puddle of his own saliva, his hoodie's hood wet. Bucky pulled out the seat next to him and sat with his coffee.   
  
"Thought we tended to wait until everyone else was awake before we started celebrating a mission, Barton. Not like you to be early for anything."  
  
"Wasn't even my call. I'd still be fast asleep if it was." Clint slowly pulled his head up from the table and took off his hood, wincing against the light of the room, to show a large dark purple stain across his right eye.   
  
This was, of course, met with raucous laughter.  
  
"How fucking drunk were you?"  
  
"I can still, at this moment, see a racoon. Shoo. Away with you, racoon."  
  
"Oh, I'm not the racoon here, Spudz Mackenzie. What's with the shiner?"  
  
"You should have seen the other guy,"  
  
"I'm the other guy." As if on cue, Natasha almost appeared from behind the party deck bar holding a coffee.  
  
"No wonder you slugged him, drunk before anyone else is even awake."  
  
"And who's fault is that?" Clint waved his hand in Natasha's general direction. "That _demon_."  
  
Natasha took off Clint's hood and ruffled his hair before sitting across from him. "Love you too."  
  
"You're the one that got him wrecked? Why'd you look like you've slept all night?"  
  
"She's _**inhuman.**_ " Clint flipped up his hood and placed his head firmly back down on the table.  
  
Slowly but surely the rest of the Avengers made their way through the deck. First, Steve who left with Bucky soon after his breakfast.They were going shopping or going to the movies or something else that Clint wasn't paying attention to when they told him. Bruce, also stopping by for a coffee, only replied "Work." when asked what his plans for the day were and then retreated back down to his workshop, his "cave" as the others called it. Natasha was still sitting making sure Clint didn't fall back asleep when Thor and Sam entered.  
  
"Gorillas!" Thor proudly announced as he sat at the table, clapping Clint on the shoulder.  
  
"You've lost me, big guy."  
  
"Gorillas! And bears!"  
  
"Oh, that explains everything."  
  
"He's going to the zoo. Hasn't stopped talking about it all morning." Sam looked at the mess slumped in the table and correctly assumed it was Clint. "You started celebrating without me? I thought we were Bird Boys!"  
  
"Remind me," Tony sauntered into the room in a bright red house robe, croissant in hand, "why are you celebrating? You stood. Mission report, sir; I stood while these two did the work." Tony waved his hand over Nat and Clint.   
  
"Like you did anything more, Stark."  
  
"Oh! Sorry, for a second there I thought I had built a crime syndicate off my own back from the ground up! Slip of the brain, my apologies. And another thing," Tony bit into his croissant," I'm not celebrating. I'm still working. We've got a heist coming up, gotta prep."  
  
"We just finished a job hours ago!"  
  
"Well then, Spudz Mackenzie-  
  
"Bucky bet you to it."  
  
-it's a good thing everyone's got the day off to recuperate, isn't it? Recuperate from standing in place, cough cough, Sam Wilson. Now while you all frolic, Mommy and Daddy are going to go do some big boy work. While I'm gone, make sure everyone has fun except Sam!" And with that, Tony left, down to Bruce's workshop.  
  
"Yknow what, I'm having fun anyway, I'm going to the zoo."  
  
"Yes! Giraffes!"  
  
"Hell yeah, Giraffes, let's go, Fabio."  
  
This left Clint and Nat alone in the party deck, one of them quietly enjoying another coffee, the other quietly slumped into a coffee table.  
  
"Nat."  
  
"What's up?"  
  
"Can we get a Burger King?"  
  
\------------------------------------  
  
"I'm just saying, a robot arm is stupid."  
  
"The movie was about superheroes. One of them shot lightning and you're complaining about a robot arm?"  
  
"It's stupid! Just use a human arm like the rest of us, Mr Big Shot Robot Man."  
  
Steve and Bucky left the cinema and sat on a bench just outside the theatre.  
  
"Ever think about how they'd react?"  
  
"That's awfully vague, Steve."  
  
Steve simply nodded forward, towards the people passing their bench, a near constant stream and curled his lip. "These are all just normal people going about their day to day life. Seeing a movie, walking their dog. If someone said to them right now, 'Hey, see those two guys on the bench? They're Avengers.', how would they react? They all know who we are, but none of them know our faces. The two "dogs" of Stark just walking among them. Suppose I'm still not used to just being...feared."  
  
"Who knows? Maybe they'd like us. I like us." That alone seemed to lessen Steve's mood. "There's an arcade over there. Beat you at air hockey?"  
  
"Deal, loser has to get a robot arm."  
  
\------------------------------------  
  
"It would have been a worthy adversery!"  
  
"Thor. I cannot stress this enough. You cannot wrestle a grizzly bear."  
  
"Sun bear? Much smaller. Weaker. Much more safe!"  
  
"No bears. At all. Size of bear does not matter."  
  
"I could settle for a Koala."  
  
"This is why we aren't going back to the Zoo."  
  
Thor and Sam, at Sam's insistence and Thor's reluctance, had now left the zoo and were now walking back to the tower. Most of the Avengers left their weapons in the tower and only brought them alone on missions. Thor on the other hand had a chrome steel shotgun in his bright pink rucksack at all times, leading to a number of altercations in which his bag was confused with a similar bag belonging to a little girl. While this was normally resolved quickly enough to prevent issue, Thor had at one point in his criminal career reached for his trusty weapon and pulled out a math textbook. Regardless, he still used it to beat his enemy into submission.  
  
"You know what might make up for beating a bear to death?"  
  
"Not very much."  
  
"There's a Krispy Kreme less than a block away."  
  
"...well, the bears aren't going anywhere."


End file.
